You came to me to learn the Pleasure of Life and the Pleasure of Art. Perhaps I am chosen to teach you something much more wonderful, the meaning of Sorrow, and its beauty. Douglas was a 21 year old Oxford undergraduate and talented poet who was familiar with Dorian Gray, and Wilde was an Irish playwright married with two sons, but the connection was patent: they swung full-throttle into a tempestuous and scandalous love-affair.
London is a desert without your dainty feet… Write me a line and take all my love — now and for ever. Always, and with devotion — but I have no words for how I love you. English advocates used it to liberate themselves from the homosexual strait-jackets on sale during the Victorian era. Douglas and Wilde finally had a place that they could house their love, a language that they could communicate in and a creative process they could systematise to suit their desires:. You send me a very nice poem, of the undergraduate school of verse, for my approval: I reply by a letter of fantastic literary conceits [reproduced above]: I compare you to Hylas, or Hyacinth, Jonquil or Narcisse, or someone whom the great god of Poetry favoured, and honoured with his love.
It can only be understood by those who have read the Symposium of Plato, or caught the spirit of a certain grave mood made beautiful for us in Greek marbles. It was, let me say frankly, the sort of letter I would, in a happy if wilful moment, have written to any graceful young man of either University who had sent me a poem of his own making, certain that he would have sufficient wit or culture to interpret rightly its fantastic phrases.
He set out to demystify the prevailing order of stern social conduct and tried to transgress the constraints of culture nature versus reality and break away from the slavery of custom.
For Wilde, although desire is deeply at odds with society in its existing forms, it does not exist as a pre-social authenticity: it is always within, and informed by, the discrimination which it also transgresses. Douglas came from a long line of chronically vicious and violent mad-men, brutes who brawled in streets and slit their own throats in suicide.
